Posts by Robert E A Harvey
2414 posts • joined Sunday 8th October 2006 16:17 GMT
Page:
feedback?
"SP1 for Windows 7 is a wrap of updates available through Microsoft's Windows Update service combined with hotfixes based on feedback Microsoft said it has received from customers and partners."
I really don't know how microsoft gets feedback from ordinary joes like me. I thought you had to pay to be allowed to talk to them.
Can someone explain how to make simple bug reports for e.g. MSword in the same way as bugzilla-type systems for OOo or Linux or Firefox?
We do need a big sod-off question mark icon for the perplexed.
title
OK, fair remark. But did skype ever prmise the lock was unbreakable? or just to connect you to yer missus over the internet?
What is the problem?
Skype took an idea that was well-known - voip - and created a version of it with their own encryption. The idea was to give them a degree of control over what was, essentially, a profit stream.
I see nothing wrong with that at all. They never claimed to be unique, just easy to use. sip and all the other systems are still out there. No-one was forced to deal with them. They were selling simplicity, and protecting their investment. Seems sensible to me.
So why is it Ok for this chap to publish details of their protection system? Sounds like someone publishing the profile of my front door key.
Posted in Treasury turns to Facebook for cut plans
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I'd have thought that, after the general election result, asking the electorate anything was a devalued idea.
Posted in OpenOffice gets Ubuntu-media friendly
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It's always tricky printing streaming media.
Posted in Waterfall Niagara speakers
IRTA
Sorry, I thought you said 'waterfall Viagra'
Paris understands.
Mandriva is paid for
I've been a paid-for mandriva user in the past, and was very very happy with the product.
What drove me to despair was their barrow-boy business model. You'd buy version 'n' of something from the web site, and 2 days later be bombarded with emails offering verison 'n+1' for exactly the same amount of money. Then every couple of weeks they would have a sale of something-or-other, including version 'n' at half what you had just paid. I was getting around 3 emails a day from them, until I invoked the spam filtering.
I now use openSuse 11.1 and Ubuntu. Will probably rationalise on one of them.
Dell's dirty secret
They do seem to be ashamed of offering Ubuntu, don't they?
I'm typing this on a dell netbook bought with ubuntu which has been rock solid and really pleasing. The purchasing was marred by their simply dreadful customer service, of course. But finding this machine on the web site, even when advertised in a flyer, was an exercise in cryptography, and they only offered it in the -we-will-let-you-put-XP-on-it-if-you-hobble-the-ram- spec forced on them by M$
Since my experience at work has led me to decide that Bill is the antichrist and that I will never again give M$ one brass farthing, it was good to be able to buy from Dell. But next time it might have to be Novatech, because Dell made it quite clear that they were far too big & clever to actually need a customer.
Posted in Why we love to hate Microsoft
The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits
"The latest XP security patch rendered Windows no longer viable on my oldest laptop"
And I have no doubt that was intentional
Ah.
Thing is, ignoring the messenger - and I think he is a twonk, and the idea of him being a great musician is laughable, no matter how many instruments he played on one album that took 18 months to make - I think he may have a point.
The balance on the internut is shifting from home-made, collaborative, genuinely interesting and creative to mass-produced, handed out to you, paid for, corporate pap. Just like everything else. Book shops are full of Tom Clancy dross, rather than samisdat manuscript subversive poetry, and the internut is drifitng the same way.
Regardless of my views on his music, I think he has often seen things the rest of us havn't. It's just that being a twonk we'd rather laugh at him than listen.
Oh look, is that icon a picture of him?
Posted in Why we love to hate Microsoft
unbundled
"what would happen to the MS-dependent ecosystem if Jobs were to unbundle the Apple OS from Apple hardware? "
I'd love that. Apple would have to write a hard-down spec for device drivers for things like sound and graphics cards, but that aside I think it would kill M$ stone hard dead. And good riddance.
Posted in Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini
Don't know about the phone,
but 12/10 for "Android 'andset".
Posted in Why we love to hate Microsoft
Choice
Let people buy new copies of XP, or even W2K, if they want.
Posted in OpenOffice gets Ubuntu-media friendly
'ang on?
An "office suite" uses a "media streamer"?
Is it me, or has the whirled gorn madd? Who, apart from a few pink-trousered show-offs in sales, need to stream media to do an office job? and won't they all be using an iPouf anyway?
Paris, 'cos I believe there is some streamable media involving her. PS: shouldn't her icon now feature hancuffs
A serious subject reduced to titilation
Now look here, el Reg. It would have been perfectly possible to report the story without demeaning references to the physical appearance of one of the spies in question. Nothing in the story depends upon her comliness, or even her gender at all. It is completely irrelevant to the facts.
But I would not have missed it for the world. Phoarr. Keep it up, lads!
Right
I used to run a small business, and if anyone asked to pay on credit or account I bunged 33% on, and flogged the invoice the same day to the bank for 30% off. It was no business of mine whether the bank collected.
If people complained at the upprice, the door was always available.
Posted in Seagate's 3TB external drive
heat?
I'm guessing they have some sort of issue that would be less apparent if only powered up occasionally.
Posted in England versus Germany: Quaff real ale
cider inside
Ale is good, dry cider better, scrumpy best.
No frothy head on cider!
Posted in Iomega Prestige Portable 1TB
power?
No mention in the review of how this thing was powered. Is it usb, double-usb, power brick? what?
Do not despair
It is difficult to imagine any modern computer that won't work fully with any Linux.
But it is SO easy to find out. You can get nearly every distro as a 'live CD' that will boot and run from the optical drive without touching the hard disk at all. You can burn a slack handful of them and try all the distros out, without installing.
another totle
...Or indeed, iPss
Posted in Dell Streak Android tablet phone
what about the phone bit?
How was it as a phone?
Did you try it with a bluetooth headset?
Not surprised
I never hear anyone reviewing smartphones talking about the phone.
I have been very dissapointed with nearly all the modern phones I have tried out, but not seen such a radical drop in signal strength as is described. but poor audio quality seems to be par for the course, especially microphone quality.
the rays, the rays
I was going to say that!
Posted in Windows 7 Backup gets users' backs up
Not the first time
I used to use NTbackup to save the state of my XP machine. It typically took around 18 hours.
Using Ubuntu's simple backup took around 90 minutes. The data was substantially the same: an operating system, a slack handful of applications, and the same big bucket of photos and music.
Now for XP I use robocopy to make a file-by-file image, and sod the OS. Takes around 4 hours.
try a lice CD or two
Try booting from live CDs to see how they get on, saves the bother of installing.
Posted in iPhone mag-stripe reader stalled
this is the title
Yep. Swipe should be dead, considering how easy it is to clone mag stripes
Just my pennyworth
I use Ubuntu, but agree that Mint is a good option for beginners too. I used to use Suse, and still rate YAST as excellent, and would be quite happy with that too.
I fell out with Mandriva, not over the distro, but over the barrowboy selling techniques, where they would take cash for version x of something, then bombard you with emails the same day to spend the same amount of money again upgrading to x+2. Then spam you remorselessly for the next thousand years. Technically it worked very well indeed.
I do have an XP partition on one machine and run andLinux on that. Recommended.
dross
I have worked with 3-axis fluxgates that did not need to be moving once they had normalised to the location. But they were jolly odd little buggers, and as you say, the presence of any physical structure will make it worthless.
what about usenet
I stopped using tbird for reading usenet, back in the 2.x days, because it could not filter on all headers, chuck out crossposts, or handle threading at all well.
How does it do now?
Posted in iPhone 4 fever takes hold. Again
Aye.
And people buy one on a 2-year contract, but a new one is released very year. There must be a lot of withdrawal symptoms going on.
I agree. This is darwinism in action. They should all be laced with bubonic plague or something.
Posted in Speed cameras slide out of LibCon budget
and
The nsl was set as part of the fuel economy measures after the first oil price shock. As far as I know no evidence has ever been set before parliament that 70 is safer than 60 or 80.
Posted in Speed cameras slide out of LibCon budget
Not to mention Lorries
The wretched things are set to catch speeding cars, not speeding lorries. Which is the biggest danger?
Except
Except that in the Winphones I've had before, fixing and updating never happens.
FOAD
Look, Redmond, just FOAD, OK?
Posted in TomTom slashes LIVE subs
good-oh.
Still can't afford it.
Wake me up when it's a tenner a year. Europewide.
Dr, Proffessor - those are titles
You know what? I don't care. I was quite keen on the idea of HD, but a glance at 'radio times' says it's not worth bothering with. It's all drivel, ain't it.
If I have absolutely nowt to do I might watch 'top gear' or 'time team', but they are repeated ad nauseum, so I don';t need to record them. 'The News Quiz' is better than HIGNFY. I bought a VHS set of the Olivia Manning 'fortunes of war', and the DVDs of Quatermass, but there's been nothing else I want to hoard. Even the new Dr. Who.
Mrs H watches TV, but I don't. I don't care what they do, because whatever it is won't include decent programmes.
Whack-O, I unforget that.
that's right
"take away Windows from them and you either make their job extremely difficult or impossible"
yep. And it is vendor's faulty thinking.
As long as you can't programme an Alan Bradley PLC or a Siemens motor controller with platform-independant software, us engineers are stuck with windows.
Where is autocad for Linux. Please?
Posted in NetSecure SmartSwipe credit card reader
OK, fair enough. But...
But what is all this 1970s stuff about mag card swiping? I used to design card-swipe readers (magneto-resistive heads, thanks for asking) in the 1970s.
I've not swiped my card in a shop or hotel for at least 3 years. It is so easy to clone a magnetic stripe. All my cards - although amex were last - have a chip-n-pin interface, and if I don't get to use a pin terminal I don't buy. That does sometimes mean paying cash at german hotels, or using my visa instead of my amex, but I don't trust mag swipe at all.
Let's see if I've got this right...
Microsoft were not really sinister and scheming, they were incompetent and careless.
So that's OK then.
Magnus
"I've started, so I'll Finnish"
I'll get my knitted sweater with the reindeer pattern on the back
It's been done
It's been done before:
http://tinyurl.com/yb692qm
I'll get me blazer. It's got natty stripes.
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Oh no. You weren't. And I bet we have been subliminally led, as well.
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So, he buys Dell, and when he gets it home discovers that not everything he was expecting was in the box, or the advertised software is a trial version.
He then has to call customer service and try to get his money back.
Good luck with that, Micheal, tell us how you get on.
Paris. just because (TM).
Lord, duke, earl - those are titles
So no *nix system has ever been rootkitted then? Why did people write Tripwire then?
Posted in Novell swings into MeeGo throng
and
How exactly would that save money?
Buy the nutbuk cheep and pirate an MS os onto it, mayhap?
Have you been aiding and abetting?
Mmmm
Bra and knickers. Mmmm
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Hmm. Just how much can you milk a cow before she turns nasty and kicks you in the buckets?
Industrial dross
Never mind the miserable phones, the industrial world is full of winCE based touch panels that crash on a daily basis, where the poor miserable sods who bet their firms on M$ havn't had an update in years & have to do so much work supporting a broken environment that they might as well have written an OS instead of buying one.
Do you think they will embed windows again? I wouldn't.
Wysiwyg
I recall using a unix-based word processor called 'Wysiword' the same year wordstar 7 was launched on the 286 based AT. It included a trypeface editor (we hadn't broken the word font back then) and a photo editor & vector graphics tool.
Byte magazine was previewing wysiwyg editors before word 4 appeared.
